No cave moss or plants in 2 caverns whatsoever after breaching them?

[ndjs]

Hello all!
I have a problem that i ran into before,

I have 2 caverns that have no plants,moss or tree growth except blood thorns and a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ of mud, creatures, however, move about aplenty.

Some people have said that the caverns are ''dry'' and need water from a natural source and that Bloodthorns need (almost?) no water so that's why they are still able to grow.

So i poured a river directly into the cavern hoping to spawn trees,plants,spores and whatnot, but nothing seems to appear at all, its still all just mud, i'm supposed to spread spores in order to expand the underground biome but it didn't seem to change, it has not been that long tho.. just a few months but everything has dried up but i see no change at all.

So i channeled down from the surface in order to make sure the surface area would be connected to the cavern, no change.

I'm supposed to spread moss spores but i'm unsure how to do this, do i need to directly expose the cavern to sunlight? Is it even possible to spread the spores? Will i end up with a surface area in a underground cavern? ( Which is fine tbh, i just need to put my animals underground, i don't want them 50 z levels above my main, in some kind of constructed room on the surface )

So my question is how do i create underground moss tiles/trees/plants since none of it spawned when i breached the caverns.. ( Oh and btw, there is no 3rd layer, i disabled it )

Any help is appreciated,

cheers.

[Zukabazuka]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K5_h3D9tYtg
You don't need to expose the area to sunlight but you do need seeds and have the dwarf do the farming. You are on the correct path to creating it with water.
The video is 30min but he does bring up a lot of good info about it.

[Saver Sigonith]

Caverns have a random chance to have no moss or plants save blood thorns! It's unlucky to hit two in the same region, but it happens. Disabling the third means it can't save you so... uh... good luck I guess. You may be stuck with surface grass for your pastures.

If you channel an area on the surface and then roof over the top of it, you can safely disconnect it from the surface with it still counting as surface. It'll grow grass and prevent miasma. I know that's inconvenient for forts living deep in the earth but hey the no miasma thing is nice.

[ndjs]

Thx guys!

Ill check out the video, seems promising, i forgot about seeds, so that's a good suggestion! and if it somehow wont work i guess ill open up the surface area and and tunnel some layers down with an open roof protected my a huge bridge above it.

[ndjs]

Hmm, so i tested some things.. I tried making a farm in 1 of the caverns layers in the hopes i could get plants/spores to start spreading everywhere, it didn't, i locked the farm behind closed doors for half a year, but the dimple cups i used only stayed on the farm tiles, nothing next to it or where another farm used to be.

Couldn't build a road, since both cavern floors are made of Diorite and contain only piles of mud, laced, with some water i poured down.

i tried locking the pigtails and dimple cup seeds while removing the farm but it just deleted everything, i'm not even sure where they all went now.

I tried making a stockpile specifically for seeds, without any container, so that maybe that way i could let it lie on the ground in the hopes it would grow on its own but nobody hauled any seeds to the location... all the stockpiles connected to that seed pile so that they would first place any seeds i have at that location, nobody showed up.

Ok so i thought, maybe if i tunnel from the surface again, but this time use pond-water, dig a mote of about 8 tiles in the cavern, making sure it would come through sandy loam and pouring murky waters, the result? 4 dusting of underlichin lying there now, but no spore tile or plants spawning as of yet.

So i realized that my embark has no sand or clay in it. ( i realize that sandy loam and clay loam are not actual sand and clay types, but i tunneled through them anyway )

Could it be that i MUST have sand and clay somewhere on my embark in order for spores to spawn?



How can i dump sand (not the bag) and raw clay there if my embark has none of it? Will a bag of sand work? Maybe put the fire clay/sandbag i traded in a stockpile on the floor and then mixing it all with water?

Honestly i'm starting to wonder if it is even possible but for science! i guess.

it's weird tho i even have blood thorns growing on the surface, in a open cave
(that i mined myself, not a natural one)
Elevation of the entrance is 48, the sky goes up to 76 the bottom is at -7 Biome is a joyous wild area.

Any ideas?


Cheers.

[Saver Sigonith]

Wow, you managed to get a few tiles of underlichen under there? Nice! That alone's an accomplishment.
Tryyy mousing over the mud in various places to see if it's growing moss underneath now. Once there's SOME cavern moss in your embark somewhere it should be able to spread to anywhere underground that's either a natural dirt (ie loam / clay / sand) tile or underground with mud on it.

Seeds don't do what you want them to. They're useless for spreading wild plants - they're only for cultivated farms. Same with the different kinds of water.

I am a bit curious what you're trying to do in particular. Do you want moss/grass for animals to graze on? Do you want farms for growing plumphelmets? Do you want wild plants to gather? These are all separate things.

[ndjs]

Originally posted by Saver Sigonith:

Wow, you managed to get a few tiles of underlichen under there? Nice! That alone's an accomplishment.
Tryyy mousing over the mud in various places to see if it's growing moss underneath now. Once there's SOME cavern moss in your embark somewhere it should be able to spread to anywhere underground that's either a natural dirt (ie loam / clay / sand) tile or underground with mud on it.

Seeds don't do what you want them to. They're useless for spreading wild plants - they're only for cultivated farms. Same with the different kinds of water.

I am a bit curious what you're trying to do in particular. Do you want moss/grass for animals to graze on? Do you want farms for growing plumphelmets? Do you want wild plants to gather? These are all separate things.

Thanks! And thanks for the reply!

Well i wanted to put my animals underground so that they would be safer, and for that i needed moss, i know how the farms work and how to build them underground and all, oh and btw, my world has no plump helmets lol, at least i can not select them at embark and the mountain home offers none, nor the elves i made contact with. It does have cave wheat,sweet pods,pig tails however.

Atm i have already secured the animals in a room i made on the surface, so i don't REALLY need moss anymore.

Now i'm just checking to see if its even possible.

Also like the moss look better then diarrhea or stone everywhere, i would also like to use different trees to make some colorful stuff, (Well there's the blood thorn though)

DF hack offers an option to change a whole layer, i haven't tried it yet and prefer not to since it might mess my game up.

Another idea i got is to retire the fortress, create or use an old adventurer and somehow bring spores to that location, maybe a cave moss man thrall might help if i just dump it there or something loaded with the right spores.

Or perhaps, upon re-embarking, there will be moss instantly since that also seems to happen allot of times.

I have to go now but ill report the findings later, lets see if those aforementioned spores actually do something in a year or 3

Cheers!

[ndjs]

So i said i would report the findings:

Nothing is growing there still, no lichen has spawned from the spores at all after 15 years now.

At one point i even got waves of sentient underlichen spreading fresh spores.. it mixed with the water and mud and then it seemed to work, but later, it turned into a dusting of spores again doing nothing.

Also, my first layer doesn't even grow blood thorns, all mud lol, it looks like the circus levels but with more mudd, maybe because blood thorns are supposed to be encountered in the lowest cavern... but in my case they grow on the surface as well, lol.


I'm not saying it is impossible but i failed to create underlichen tiles, i have not tried tampering with it with adventure mode yet but i'm running out of ideas.

If it's just not possible it would be cool to have as a future feature.

[Sander]

i have that in a certain way in my current fortress. basically i had a magma pipe reach up to the second cavern layer, surrounded by the cavern lake. water everywhere. yet even though i had moss on the first layer, none grew on the mud that was first present on the magma pipe area from the start.

the moss started growing under the first mud and on other tiles that i muddied by pumping water onto the tiles but the mud that was there from the start never had moss grow ontop of it.

*Edit*
Just checked it and moss doesnt grow right ontop of the magma pipe, though plants do grow there on rough surface that i acquired by obsidian casting. and there are young trees sprouting up too. but no moss, even on muddied tiles

[HueSatLight]

cave moss man, sentient underlichen? is those from a mod or procedurally generated night creature or what? because I am intrigued

[ndjs]

Originally posted by Sander:

i have that in a certain way in my current fortress. basically i had a magma pipe reach up to the second cavern layer, surrounded by the cavern lake. water everywhere. yet even though i had moss on the first layer, none grew on the mud that was first present on the magma pipe area from the start.

the moss started growing under the first mud and on other tiles that i muddied by pumping water onto the tiles but the mud that was there from the start never had moss grow ontop of it.

*Edit*
Just checked it and moss doesnt grow right ontop of the magma pipe, though plants do grow there on rough surface that i acquired by obsidian casting. and there are young trees sprouting up too. but no moss, even on muddied tiles

So if i understand correctly, you were able to create plants and trees in the once empty cavern? I only have access to water from the surface however.

And those trees, are there multiple types? or just Bloodthorns?

I could try out obsidian casting the whole cavern, nothing in it anyway, except a single forgotten beast, interesting.

Thanks!

[ndjs]

Originally posted by HueSatLight:

cave moss man, sentient underlichen? is those from a mod or procedurally generated night creature or what? because I am intrigued

I use the ' More Vanilla Creatures ' mod, so yeah, ads some more variety.

[Sander]

Originally posted by ndjs:

So if i understand correctly, you were able to create plants and trees in the once empty cavern? I only have access to water from the surface however.

And those trees, are there multiple types? or just Bloodthorns?

I could try out obsidian casting the whole cavern, nothing in it anyway, except a single forgotten beast, interesting.

Thanks!

There were trees in the cavern layer, but the mud near the magma pipe had no moss on it. Moss started growing later on, but under the mud. Not on it, as if the mud layer was an object. With trees sprouting up ontop of it.
And yes, multiple types of trees, i havent breached the 3rd layer yet so no Bloodthorns.

My guess is that the "square" that has the magma pipe has its properties from map gen and works differently from the rest of the cavern thusly. Likewise, your second cavern layer has its properties set and you might have to build walls ontop of the mud/deconstruct them after being built to revert to standard soil underneath so moss could grow on it.

[HueSatLight]

been looking more into this, did an experiment or two. killed a dwarf caving in some soil layer into a cavern (that experiment was a dead-end).
good news and bad news, maybe. or all bad news.
It is possible to force grass to grow underground, if you use dfhack.
It will not cause spores to be released.

Just like above ground, the caverns are a kind of region that don't cover the whole world (but they are probably larger than your site). And some of their data is what plants naturally grow there. If you have a cavern devoid of all fungus (trees, herbs, and grass), then none of those spores are released when you breach that cavern. Forcing cavemoss to grow in a desolate cavern won't release spores, even when you force the moss before you breach that cavern.

I am checking what happens if you change the cavern region's fungal population (before and after breaching). I suspect that if after breaching, you'll at most get growths in that cavern, but not elsewhere. Before breaching you might get a spore release. Or maybe nothing in both cases, the property I'm editing is called "feature_init" and it's after init time.

[ndjs]

Thx for the information everybody!

I have obsidian cast a part of the cavern and poured new water on it to see if it would grow on the obsidian but nothing happened for over 2 years.

I am aware dfhack offers options to change layers, might try that out later, curious to see what results you get HeuSatLight!

thx all!

[HueSatLight]

pre-embark, the changes work great... mostly. I'm doing it sloppily, so the game doesn't exit properly afterwards. But the cavern has full grown trees and shrubs. No moss, but I have another cavern with muddy stone and naturally occurring fungus and it has no moss either.
The area edges of the tree/shrub squares show moss graphics. Anyways, as soon as I breached, my near-surface soil levels started filling up with moss.

between embark and breaching: no trees or shrubs or moss in cavern, as expected. Maybe some would sprout given enough time, but when I breached I didn't get moss in my near-surface soil.

After breaching. Nothing. I'm pretty sure I let it run long enough that shrubs and saplings should have been showing up somewhere in the cavern.

There's probably an elsewhere for setting current population instead of init population, and potentially somewhere to trigger a breach-like spore event. I'm probably not going to experiment much more with it right now. I've got a couple of other things on the burner I'm messing around with (pantheon/religions stuff, civ emblems, and my literal lunch on a literal burner)